


anyway, i love you (y'know?)

by sure sure (getoffmysheets)



Series: Red in Tooth and Claw [8]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Daemons, F/M, Falling In Love, Grief/Mourning, Joyce Byers: Head Mom, Let Joyce and Jim Be Happy 2019, Not Really Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-16 04:28:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21265064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getoffmysheets/pseuds/sure%20sure
Summary: “You stood me up, Jim Hopper.”





	anyway, i love you (y'know?)

Joyce didn’t bat an eyelash when Will said he wanted to spend the night at Mike’s house. She hadn’t made a secret of her lack of enthusiasm for staying in Hawkins. Jonathan had already graduated from high school and she could wait another few months to put El in school until she knew for sure where they were living. She assumed that he was trying to get in as much time with Mike, Dustin, and Lucas as possible.

In fact, she had no suspicions at all until after all of her children had supposedly gone to bed. Laying on her back, she glances over at the bedside table to check her clock. 11:43.

Normally, when Eleven has gone to sleep, Brigantia often snuck over to sleep with her. El is too guilty about handing over more sadness to her to let Joyce touch her during the day but she suspects that Hopper used to have a lot of contact with her. Joyce thinks that they will settle soon. She knows that the beagle is El’s favorite, an imitation as close to Andraste’s form as they could manage. Lately, Brigantia has appeared either as a mink with beautiful silky fur or an enormous grey wolf larger than Eleven herself, which Joyce thinks both match El much better than the beagle.

But it’s already close to midnight and either Brigantia fell asleep before El, or El still hasn’t managed to get to sleep.

“Joyce?” Sindri asks sleepily, watching her pull on her robe.

“It’s too quiet,” she mutters, pausing so that he can leap and cling to her back.

All the suspicions she didn’t have before burst into her mind when she peaks in to check on Eleven and realizes that the room was very quiet. “El? Eleven?” She shoves the door open, letting the light from the hallway spill onto the empty bed. “Jane Hopper, you’d better be in the bathroom.”

She isn’t.

Joyce storms back down the hall to yank open the door to the room Jonathan and Will now share together. Both beds are empty.

She stares at the neatly folded blankets and fluffed pillows, clutching the doorframe for support.

On the one hand, at least she can be sure that Eleven didn’t go by herself because her idiot (darling) son went with her.

On the other hand, Joyce knows damn well that there’s only place they’d go that they’d lie to her about.

“Why,” she whispers to herself, pulling on her street clothes and grabbing the car keys. She turned the key in the ignition, pounding her fists on the steering wheel. “Why did you _do this_?”

“He would’ve done anything for her,” Sindri says, hands curled in her shirt. “He would’ve done anything to make her happy and she doesn’t know how to let him go, Joyce. She’s never had to lose anything she loved as much as she loved him.”

She wipes her eyes with her shaking hands. “She never had anything had at all, before him.”

“Is it really so surprising that she’s willing to try everything?”

“We _watched_ them die, Sindri,” she sobs, staring at the blurry image of her front porch. “And I can’t let her give me hope. Because I can’t-” She took a deep breath. “Right. Okay. We’re going back to the lab, getting them out, and then they are grounded _forever_.”

By the time they get there, it’s even worse than she thought. Eleven has already opened the gate and it’s clear from the radio that they are already inside of it. It’s all of her nightmares rolled into one, two of her three children, to say nothing of Nancy and Steve, risking their lives for a man who would hate the idea of them trading their lives for his.

“I don’t want to hear another word except ‘yes, Mom’, Jonathan Byers. You get out of there, _RIGHT THIS GODDAMN SECOND_. Eleven looks…”

She paused, the hand holding the radio dropping down to her side. She meant to say ‘Eleven looks dreadfully pale’, but the young lady staring back at her had to be at least ten years older than her daughter was. There was only one explanation for what she was seeing. “Eleven?” Human daemons were for serial killers and teen suicide victims, not for her poor lost girl. “_Baby_…El…”

In her hand, Eleven says “I’m really alright, Joyce. I promise.” Then, as though she’s _trying_ to make Joyce cry again, “I promise on my dad.”

One of the boys asks what’s going on when in front of her, Brigantia seems to be laughing and crying at the same time, a long wordless shriek of immense joy and relief leaving her. Then Eleven screams loud enough to be heard in three universes never mind of them.

“ANNE-DEE!”

“Mom?” Brigantia asks, soft with concern as she examines Joyce’s white face over her shoulder.

Robin makes a sound of alarm and clasps her shoulders, lowering her to the floor before her weak knees send her there quicker.

They hear crackles through the radio, on and off. She still doesn’t quite believe it until she hears Andraste – against all odds, all logic. That is her voice.

“I knew!” Andy said with an eager, excited whine. “I knew that you’d find us anyway, no matter where we were!”

Brigantia is sobbing continuously, but cannot lower her hands until everyone has been evacuated from the gate. Joyce raises a shaky hand. “You stood me up, Jim Hopper.”

Hop’s laugh is exhausted, weary. “I’ll make it up to you.” He’s slurring with tiredness. God, he must not have gotten any real rest in weeks. “Not any time soon, I’m afraid.”

She covers her eyes with a shaking hand. Softly, with great affection and pain, she says “I’ll wait for you, Hop.”

Quietly, she hears Jonathan say “Come on, Chief. Up and at 'em. We could probably talk Mom into any meal you like.”

“Eights hours of sleep,” Hop groans, with a heave as Jonathan assists him up. “And an Eggo extravaganza. Right, my girl?”

El sobs. “Yes, Dad.”

\---

He insists that he's fine. He isn't injured, he just needs to sleep for the next week or two.

"You'll sleep in my bed. No, don't argue with me. Your granddad's cabin was leveled to the ground, Hop. There's nowhere else for you to lay your head."

"Who's arguing, I'm not arguing." To El, latched to his side: "Are you arguing?"

"No fighting," she agrees, then gives a jaw-cracking yawn.

Jonathan managed to clean the blood from her face, so that she didn't walk around looking like her own production of _Carrie._ Her nose had finally stopped bleeding with the gate sealed again. Jonathan is also the one who gets up and coaxes her to get ready for bed, though Brigantia stays right where she is.

Joyce hovers between Hopper, collapsed on the sofa and Brigantia, whose familiar face is the color of chalk. It's strange to see a human face, El's human face, and know that she's really a daemon. She flutters over her, wanting to help but continuously having to remind herself that she can't reach out and touch her.

Sindri finally grows concerned enough to settle on her knee. "Is it...have we...is something wrong? Can we fix it?"

"Nothing's wrong, Sindri," Hopper murmurs, surprising them. "That's just what Brigantia looks like, sometimes."

"I'm settled," Brigantia tells him from her spot at his knee beside Andy, with a hint of pride in her voice. Hop reaches out to touch her, gently stroking a few of the wild strands of hair. She huffs. "You aren't even surprised."

"Why d'you think I named you after a war goddess?" Hopper asks sleepily, resting his palm on her skull, still smaller than his hand despite her adult appearance.

She beams at him and a pulse of his affection warms her like summer never did.

She and El go bed, unable to stay upright any longer. They expended a lot of energy - she'd better make Eggos by the truckful.

Jonathan helps her get Hop into bed and then kisses her on the cheek. "Going over to Steve's."

"Is that where Max's brother went?"

"Yeah, I wanna see how they're doing, you can take my room." Jonathan wasn't naive enough to think she'd actually sleep there, but Joyce appreciated his thoughtfulness. She always did.

She tugs his jacket. "Come back for breakfast, baby. You can bring them with you."

"Okay, Mom."

She and Sindri listen to the sounds of the almost quiet house before she pads back down the hall. As she suspected, he isn't sleeping.

"Thought you were tired," she murmurs, sitting at the edge of the bed.

"Thought I was too," he says, all breath and no voice. "It's just...loud. Louder, here."

She stands, feeling like a jerk. "Sorry, I'll-"

"Joyce," Andy whispers, moving over Hop's legs to sit at her side of the bed. "Stay."

And Andraste tilts her head, looking at her with her toffee eyes. Begging. And she drops down to the bed like a puppet with its strings cut, because she hates that. Joyce doesn't want him to feel like he needs to beg for her attention, she wouldn't do that.

Tentatively, she reaches for Andy's head, giving them enough time to pull away. She doesn't. Her hands curl around the soft chocolate ears, and Joyce leans hard against her with the weight of his exhaustion. Hopper sighs, a low sound like a knot has loosen in his back or something.

Joyce kisses Andy on the nose, adoring, without caring that he knows it. She's done pretending this isn't what it is.

He is too tired to speak to her, but he can send images. Feelings. Memories.

She sits behind him. They have the same Algebra class, even though she's already a senior and he's only a junior. They're both dating other people, so when they flirt with each other, there's no weight to it.

Despite all those factors, Jim's got still a horribly large crush on her. She's clever and a bit naughty despite her quiet demeanor. Her lemur daemon climbs on top of Andy's shoulders and whispers slyly in her ear during class when they should both be concentrating. 

He develops a habit of white-knuckling the fur at the back of Andy's neck whenever Joyce walks into the math room. He's gets so excited to see her that he knows Andy won't be able to help letting it show if he lets her go. 

School seems a lot duller after she graduates, and their lives don't really interact after that.

Jim sees her just a week before his own graduation, a year afterward. Andy whispers her name to him in the middle of a grocery store and he knows she's married now, but he still turns his head. And he feels like someone punched him in the teeth, because she's holding her baby and while he aged one year, she's aged ten. He knows being a new mama is hard, but her skin looks so white and fragile, papery, and her enormous brown eyes are at least the size of the ocean. There's a bruise just below her jaw. It looks like a thumb. Like someone grabbed her around the throat and held her.

His mother tells him he needs to shut his mouth, he needs to stay out of the Byers marriage. "Use your brain, Jim. I know you got one. You're leaving town next month. You beat the shit outta Lonnie, who d'you think he'll take that out on? You think she needs the town whispering that she sleeps around with the Hopper kid?"

"I've _never_ cheated on Diane!" 

"Don't matter, Jimmy. That's what they'll say and you won't be around anymore. You have any idea how they'll treat her? And forget the town, what do you think is gonna happen if Lonnie hears that? He doesn't have the guts to punch _you_. You're not her white knight, Jimmy. You can't save her - she needs to save herself."

So he doesn't say anything at all but he thinks of her a lot. Wonders if her son Jonathan is a good boy, or if he makes his mother's life hard like Lonnie does.

Jim goes to New York, Vietnam, Indianapolis and everywhere he goes, he hopes that she's okay. Even after he and Diane get married and Sarah is born, he always spares a thought to hope that wherever she is, she's alright. Random things and people bring her face back to him - a young mother in Central park, holding a laughing toddler. The smell of the gingerbread she used to sneak to him in her pockets from the bakery she worked in until she had Jonathan. A little girl with huge dark eyes in a Vietnamese village, who looks too old for her age and trusts him enough to take peppermints from his hand.

When he circles the world just to come back to Hawkins, with even less than he left with, part of him wants to speak to her again, just for a moment or two, but he...he's made enough of a mess of his life and she finally seems okay with hers. Her little boy Will looks just like her, especially the eyes.

Eleven looks like that, too. Entire galaxies, in her eyes.

Joyce knows he must be near-delirious with tiredness - he seems to think that he's been speaking to her out loud instead of telling her through Andy. 

"You're a foolish man," Sindri murmurs.

He makes a questioning sound, ending in a gasp of surprise when his hand brushes the silvery fur over his side.

Joyce stands behind the gym in a pink dress that she hates but everyone keeps complimenting. Lonnie somehow managed to get drunk at a school dance before ten o'clock and so here she is, choosing to hide behind the gym instead of dancing and luckily, she's found by Jim Hopper instead of Mr. Cooper. 

She always seems to feel a little helpless, somehow, and standing there as he looms over her in her party dress, watching her shiver and the plumes of white mist coming out of her mouth, Joyce feels a _lot_ helpless. 

Then Hop takes off his jacket and drapes it over her shoulders, careful to let Sindri get out of the way first. He leans right up against her, slouching down against the bricks, lazy and relaxed as he lights up a cigarette. He makes a sly comment about the cut of Martha Maynard's dress and she can't stop herself from laughing. 

And just like that, she doesn't feel helpless anymore.

After a cigarette, he convinces her to dance, the music in the gym humming out into the night. Joyce bursts into laughter at his ridiculous behavior during "Hanky Panky" and "Wild Thing". She wants to ask for another dance during a slower song, like "Let It Be Me", but she hasn't got the courage. Their staggering height difference makes dancing awkward, but for once, she's glad for it. Hop won't be able to feel how painfully hard her heart beats whenever he grabs her hand. 

She stands there in the dark, wearing his jacket and sharing a cigarette, and he smiles at her. For just a moment, she is completely and perfectly happy. 

Joyce has spent half of her adult life wondering what would've happened if she'd have said what she wanted to say just then - an inelegant sentence of word vomit that basically amounted to "_So...anyway, I love you and whatever. Y'know?_" 

But she isn't very good at keeping any man but Lonnie Byers around, god help her. She's...odd. Joyce knows it. So she says nothing.

Hop rumbles, an unhappy sort of sad sound, stroking reverently down Sindri's back and it makes them shudder, because the touch seems to encompass nearly the whole of Sindri's body. Nearly the whole of her own. 

"I can't show you how wrong you are right now," he slurs, without opening his eyes. He arranges his hands around her waist, and her hands at his shoulders. As though they are dancing. "But, Joyce, you gotta know that I really, _really_ want to."

That moment of complete and perfect happiness returns. Joyce rests her head upon his chest. "I'm not going anywhere, Hop." 

**Author's Note:**

> I promise I will get to Steve and Billy, but I prefer for characters to have their own space in this series.
> 
> Check it out! Now that everyone is settled, I can show you guys the human/daemon photosets!: https://carol-effing-danvers.tumblr.com/tagged/red-in-tooth-and-claw


End file.
